The scent of aging paper and leather was the only air Liam Caldwell ever wanted to breathe. It was the smell of history, of stories waiting to be discovered, of his grandfather.
Here, inside the hallowed, dusty halls of “The Last Chapter,” time seemed to move at a more civilized pace. Dust motes danced like tiny fairies in the honeyed afternoon light slanting through the tall, wavy glass of the storefront window, illuminating the worn spines of books that had been waiting patiently for their person for decades.
Liam ran a calloused thumb over the gold-leaf title of a first edition of The Grapes of Wrath, the friction a familiar comfort. He adjusted its position on the “Staff Picks” shelf—a grand title for a staff of one—and sighed.
The silence in the shop was a heavy blanket, comforting in its familiarity but suffocating in its implications. The antique brass cash register, a relic his grandfather had polished with pride every Saturday morning, hadn’t rung in over an hour.
A neat but ominous stack of brown-windowed envelopes sat beside it, a silent chorus of pending doom.
This store was more than a business; it was a legacy. Every scuffed floorboard, every overstuffed armchair leaking its cotton guts, every towering, teetering stack of paperbacks in the corner was a piece of his family.
He could still see his grandfather, a man with ink-stained fingers and spectacles perched on the end of his nose, sitting in the deep leather chair by the fireplace, reading to a six-year-old Liam.
“Books, my boy,” he’d said, his voice a low rumble, “are the only magic I know for sure exists.”
Liam now felt less like a magician and more like the bumbling caretaker of a forgotten museum. He was thirty-four, with the weary posture of a much older man and a permanent scowl he’d inherited along with the bookstore.
He loved this place with a fierce, protective ache, but love wasn’t paying the electricity bill.
A sudden burst of manufactured cheerfulness from across the town square shattered the quiet. It was a sound so alien to his world of soft-turned pages that it felt like an assault.
Liam straightened up, his joints cracking in protest, and moved to the front window, peering past the display of local poetry he’d meticulously arranged that morning.
Directly opposite “The Last Chapter,” where old Mrs. Gable’s knitting shop had gathered dust for fifty years before she retired, a new business was having its grand opening. And it was an affront to everything Liam held dear.
“The Daily Grind.”